It is interesting to note how very few North American cities resisted the sanctioned and popular cries for urban highways from the 50’s to the 70’s. It was a different time, but a lot of people felt very strongly that a city could not survive without them. Many still do.

Most cities have other cities to the north, south, east and west. Freeway builders and residents alike were able to justify building a freeway so through traffic could bypass the city on the way to somewhere else. Vancouver, on the other hand, is pretty much the end of the road.

Unfortunately, bypasses tend to attract large scale development that shifts the focus away from the area originally being bypassed. In many cities old downtowns slowly died when shiny new malls and business parks sprung up along the bypasses. Local and through traffic were increasingly mixed together completely negating the justification for the freeway in the first place. The increasingly diverse combination of origins and destinations made it difficult to serve demand using public transit and the long distances meant that human powered transportation options were impractical. Urban freeways were an investment in driving that entrenched it as the only way to get around.

Look at aerial photos of North America and you’ll find thousands of hectares devoted to roads and parking lots. Old photos of Vancouver reveal much the same thing. Land, cars and gasoline were relatively cheap and few foresaw where things were going. I remember my parents packing me into the gas guzzling V-8 Oldsmobile and driving 13.5km across the city to buy groceries from a discount store when we lived less than 300m from a Safeway, independent butcher and other local retailers.